Difference between Scrum Master and a Project Manager

The Scrum Master is like a coach and a mentor, and look at the project from different angles. The project remains the responsibility of the product owner, who has the authority to take final decisions. Scrum master can help the Product Owner by sharing user experiences and feedbacks, challenges faced by them, functionality issues, and any need to realign the development to fit with changes outside the business.

Can Scrum master act as a project manager?

The scrum master is supposed to own the process. If you are the scrum master and doing the daily standup and are staying close to the team. You can find out about this very quickly. The Product Owner is trying to add stories after everybody has already agreed on what is in the sprint? Figure out what is going on and find out what they are thinking. Maybe they aren’t as familiar with the process as they should be. Maybe they just don’t care, you need to find it out. But in many cases, you should be able to reflect their behavior and how it impacts the team back to them, and come to some rational change.

From a project perspective scrum is only one aspect of the entire project life-cycle. A project manager’s role is to manage the entire Project Life Cycle. The Scrum Master’s key role is to facilitate and protect the sprint team from external interference whereas the project manager’s role is to facilitate the entire project organization and protect the entire implementation team including the Scrum Master and Sprint Teams from external interference.A scrum master does not manage risk by him or herself. A project manager takes the responsibility of all the risks related to the project.An agile project manager is a full time role and manage the geographically distributed team, whereas Scrum Master is not a full time position.A project manager is involved in analysis, listening stories and gathering data, but a Scrum Master may or may not know how to gather the data.

A Scrum Master can certainly elevate to a position of project manager but will need more than Scrum experience to do so.In terms of behavior, most project managers get it these days that command and control is out and facilitation is in. This is not to say they don’t still manage, just that they engage more. Project managers try all possible ways to achieve the desire outcome. So in a sense, project managers are becoming more like Scrum Masters.

It’s really not enough to produce a product but it is important to deliver a quality product which meets the client’s expectation to a great extent.This can be checked by taking a feedback from a wider range of audience. The ScrumMaster can help facilitate these changes by helping the product owner in understanding the impact on the product and documenting it. One should not think of scrum master to be a team lead.Often the development team needs a development lead who has particular skills and experience and is able to manage the team and assist the junior level programmers in technical issues. Again it is not the role of a Scrum Master role, it is specifically a role required within the team.If the project requires a technical lead within the team who can manage, assist, and take responsibility for the development.

Having knowledge of Agile principles and possessing technical knowledge are all important, this can be acquired by PMI ACP certification. Projects are defined by the product owner and developed by the development team.The scrum master is an entirely different role from that of the project manager or the lead developer, he neither own the product nor develop it, but is there to facilitate and ensure that Agile processes are being followed.

 

 

About Sparsh Goyal

A passionate IT professional, Sparsh Goyal boasts of 4.3+ years of experience. He has worked for various projects under AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Spring Boot, Python, Microservices, RESTful, RESTFUL APIs/SOAP, Scripting, Shell and JAVA. He is also working towards gaining proficiency in Oracle Cloud PaaS, DevOps, SaaS and Docker/Kubernetes. His primary and secondary skills validate his relentless pursuits of expanding his horizon and developing more as an IT person. He boasts of the following certifications: *Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer. *AWS Cloud Solutions Architect Associate. *Oracle certified JAVA programmer.
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